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About Me

I live and blog in Ann Arbor, Michigan. University of Michigan BA and MA from Eastern Michigan University. One term in the Michigan Army National Guard. The Institute of Land Warfare, Army magazine, Military Review, and Joint Force Quarterly have published my occasional articles.

The Undead Archives

My undead archives pre-Blogger were actually restored to life after Geocities sites went dark. Start at the old home page here.
If you find a link to the old site on the current site or old site, you should be able to replace the "g" in "geocities" with an "r" and make a good link.
I hope to move all the older archives here (and started that project) but it is really tedious.

Saturday, December 13, 2014

The China Problem

China's economy is now larger than our economy--if you use purchasing power parity (in China, a loaf of bread is far cheaper than it is here, so effectively they have more money than it seems) rather than raw GDP which we still dominate.

This article speculates that rather than worrying about the rise of Chinese power causing war, we should worry about China's decline:

What will be the geopolitical implications for China, its neighbors and the United States if the Chinese economy tanks? Would China be taken off of its supposed collision course, or would conflict remain unavoidable? ...

Which brings us to our second theory—one that I believe is more likely to materialize. This theory posits that an economic downturn in China will cause a crisis in legitimacy for the Chinese Communist Party, who will in turn point to external threats to bolster its internal legitimacy. China’s leaders, in other words, will play the nationalism card, perhaps provoking an international conflagration in one or more of the aforementioned flashpoints.

I don't get too worked up over the PPP comparison since it is essentially a scoring handicap for Third World economies compared to advanced economies. Raw GDP is still the way one has weight in the international community which doesn't really care that someone in China pays less for a cup of coffee at their corner shop than we do. This measuring stick has uses, of course, as does per-capita comparisons.

For example, defense spending comparisons greatly under-estimate China's spending by failing to consider how much cheaper it is to field and equip a Chinese solder by PPP measures (in addition to the other personnel costs that we endure plus spending categories involved with projecting power globally that other countries don't have).

But notwithstanding the real achievement of this milestone, if China's economic problems are really bad enough to threaten the growth that got China to this point, the chance of China's rulers using a foreign flashpoint to bolster their rule is under-estimated by using a Western model of internal versus external policies.

For China's Communist rulers, all problems anywhere are part of a continuum of threats to their rule. So all responses are part of a continuum, too, with no Western break between domestic and foreign actions. There is no particular gap to leap by using an "international conflagration" to stoke nationalistic support for Chinese Communist Party rule in the face of economic difficulties.

Remember, China already says that "foreign" (from our view) territorial disputes with Japan, Taiwan, claimants to South China Sea islands, and India are all actually internal issues of Chinese land that foreigners have no business even talking about.

If conflict really is unavoidable whether China rises of declines as the article says theory predicts, perhaps we will be saved by that internal/exterior model when the Chinese Communist Party finds itself fighting newly external foes that were once internal problems in our thinking.

That may not matter to the party itself with its view of all threats to its rule, but it will matter a great deal to us if the fighting is mostly inside China's current borders.

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Note on site statistics: When I strip out the junk hits from Blogger statistics that seem to come and go in waves, I appear to have about 10,000 hits per month.

My old statistics package, Site Meter, seems to miss a lot and even disappears visits after they've appeared.

I just added a new StatCounter. So far it shows far fewer hits than Blogger and is more in line with Site Meter. But I suspect neither of the non-Blogger statistics register hits from social media. So I'm not sure what my audience size is. It is puzzling to me.